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SharePoint 2013 Out of Box Web Parts

To carry on the tradition of my most popular post, which is the list of 2010 web parts, I figured I’d delve into documenting the list of 2013 ones as well. Here is the extensive list, in order that the web parts are shown in SharePoint, with information about each one. I’ve also made notes about which ones are available in Office 365, and which ones are new.

Web parts:

Blog

These are all used on a blog site template.

Blog Archives – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Used on a blog site, and is typically shown on the left side of the page. It lets you browse to older blog posts by month.

Blog Notifications – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
By default, this is shown on the right side of a blog site, with links to get to the RSS feed or create SharePoint alerts for the blog.

Excel Web Access – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Allows you to display a spreadsheet in a web part and much, much more. Here’s more info. Also, here’s a great tutorial/demo that Joelle Farley did here.

Indicator Details – Enterprise only – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Once you have a status list on your site, which looks like this (icon shown below), then you can pick one specific KPI from that list to display in this web part. You can even decide what the status icons should look like.

Status List – Enterprise only – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Status lists (KPIs) have NOT been depreciated in SharePoint 2013, but you can’t create one on the “Add an app” page. Read this blog post where he discovered how to find them in 2013. You have to create a report library and use the web part page with status list content type.

Visio Web Access – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Allows you to view Visio diagrams in the browser, and even interact with them!

Community

These web parts are used on the community site template, which is new in 2013

About this community – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
States when the community was established. This date is set on the Community settings page.

Join – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
For users who are not already members, it allows them to join.

My Membership – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This web part can be added to your community site or any site that has the community features enabled. It shows the currently logged in user all of the information about their own participation in that community.

Tools – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
These are the tools for the community administrators.

What’s happening – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This web part shows information about the current community. The number of members, discussions and replies.

Content Rollup

Categories – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365

Content Query – Publishing features enabled – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This web part lets you roll up content from within a site collection. This particular one is rolling up tasks and grouping them by the name of the site that the tasks are on.

Content Search – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365 Enterprise
Here is a separate blog post that I wrote about it, with a video as well.

Project Summary – NEW – Enterprise site collection features must be enabled – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This web part displays a great timeline around a task list. There are little arrows at the top right that let you toggle between the timeline and the list of late tasks. When you create a site from the project site template, this web part is included on the homepage by default.
The web part settings allow you to pick a task list, and choose some more options from the checkboxes below. The upcoming setting will also let you show items from the calendar on the site.

Relevant Documents – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Shows documents on the current site that are relevant to the current user. Settings allow you to check boxes for items that were modified by, created by, or checked out to the current user. This is from all libraries on the site.

RSS Viewer – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Allows you to input the URL of an RSS feed in the web part settings, and see that feed on your page. Note that if you want to view a SharePoint list or any SharePoint data as an RSS feed, you’ll need to be using Keberos for authentication on your farm.

Site Aggregator – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Lets each end user add in their favorite sites, to see a quick list of content from that site. The little blue button at the top right is clicked to add each new site, and they are displayed in tabs across the web part. You can see I’ve added three to the one below.

Sites in Category – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Displays sites from the site directory within a specific category. This appears to be a residual web part from older versions of SharePoint.

Summary Links – Publishing features enabled – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Allows you to enter in a list of links and group them by one grouping level. For each link, you can also point to an image that is already in a library on your SharePoint site.

Table of Contents – Publishing features enabled – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Displays the navigational hierarchy of your site, up to three levels deep. You set what level it starts from, within your site collection.

Term Property – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Shows information about a term in the managed metadata term store. You can select if you’d like it to show the Name, Description, Path, ID, or any other custom property. In this example, I selected the “Overtime” term, and selected to show the path. Although it looks like a navigation breadcrumb trail, these are not clickable links.

Timeline – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This one is similar to the Project Summary web part, except it’s more simplified. Notice that there’s no “add task” or “edit list” button, and there is no pretty little pane on the left letting you know about overdue, soon due tasks and such. The web part settings allow you to pick a web, list and view name. The thing that’s BETTER than the project summary one, is that this one lets you pick a different site, and the other doesn’t.

Document Sets

These two web parts can’t really be placed just anywhere on your site, like the homepage. They are the built in web parts that are part of a document set when you’re viewing it. So you create a document set, click the name of it, and then these web parts display the info about it and the list of documents inside of it.

Document Set Contents – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
The one on the bottom in the screenshot above.

Document Set Properties – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
The one on top in the screenshot above.

Filters

– Enterprise site collection features must be enabled for these to exist. All of these web parts must have web part connections as part of their functionality. The purpose is to send a filter to some other web part like a list, to filter what is displayed in that list.

Apply Filters Button – SharePoint 2013
This is used in conjunction with one of the other filter web parts, such as SharePoint List filter, choice filter or text filter. It just gives the end user a button to click in order to apply the filter they just selected. The settings allow you to change the verbiage on the button, and allow end users to save their favorite filter selection if they want. If this web part is not used, the user’s filter choice will be applied immediately instead of waiting for them to click a button. This is what the properties look like:

Choice Filter – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Allow users a set of choices to pick from. This is a list of hard coded choices that you type directly into the web part settings. Here are the properties, which allow you to make it required, enter a default value, show “Empty” as one of the options, or choose multiple values.Note that it doesn’t look like a drop-down box, it looks like this:

Date Filter – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Use the date filter to pass date information to another web part to filter that web part. Then, you can send the exact date filter to the other (usually a list or library) web part, or send it as a parameter.
Note: Metadata Navigation and Filtering can be used for filtering dates as well. This is a feature that you can turn on in the list of site features. Once you’ve activated this feature, go into the list or library settings page and click Metadata Navigation. Add your date field to the key filters area. This filter will end up showing in the left navigation when viewing your list/library.

Filter Actions – Office 365
Use this web part when you have 2 or more filter Web Parts on one page and you want to synchronize the display of the filter results. This is the same as the Apply Filters web part in SP 2013.

Page Field Filter – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This filter lets you use the title of the page in order to filter one or more web parts on that page by that value.

SharePoint List Filter – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This one is similar to the Choice filter web part, and looks the same, except instead of manually typing all the choices into the web part settings, you’re using a SharePoint list (from any web in your site collection) as the list of choices. Pick a field for the value and a different field for the display if you’d like.Note! Once you pick a view, the only fields that will be available in the value and description boxes will be fields that are actually in your view. In this case, I had to edit the “All contacts” view to include the ID field and the Last Name field (not the last name with drop-down one).

Forms

HTML Form Web Part – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This one lets you use free form HTML code in order to create a form on your page. This requires knowledge of how to write HTML code. By default it gives you a single text box on the form.

InfoPath Form Web Part – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Create an InfoPath form in a form library or customize a SharePoint list using InfoPath, and then that form can be placed directly on any page in SharePoint!

Media and Content

Content Editor – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This is a completely free-form web part that lets you type text and format it and/or insert code or just edit the HTML. After you insert this web part on the page, put your cursor in the web part and you’ll see the Format Text tab in the ribbon. There is a button in there, Edit Source if you’d like to delve into the code. Otherwise just start typing text.

Get started with your site – NEW – Getting Started site feature enabled – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This web part helps you get started with a new site by providing you some shortcuts.

Share your site – This is the same as clicking the Share button at the top right corner of the site.

Working on a deadline? – Lets you quickly add a task list and calendar to the site

Add lists, libraries, and other apps – Takes you to the Site Contents page

What’s your style – Takes you to the Change the Look page, which is the same as clicking Site Settings and choosing Change the Look.

Your site. Your brand. – This is the same as clicking Site Settings and choosing Title, Description and Logo.

Keep email in context – In Office 365, this takes you to a page that lets you add a site mailbox.

Image Viewer – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Lets you insert an image onto your page. Also, since your home page is a wiki page, you can insert pictures directly on it without having to use this web part.

Media Web Part – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Lets you show a video on your site. When you insert it on a page, instead of going to “Edit Web Part” to open up the web part toolpane like you would normally do for other web parts, with this one you click to select the web part, and then click on the Media tab in the ribbon.Then you can select media from your hard drive, SharePoint or elsewhere, and even pick what image you want displayed as the default before the movie starts.

Page Viewer – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
This one is very clunky, and lets you view another web page from within your SharePoint page… like a window.

Picture Library Slideshow – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
A picture library on your site is required for this to work. Click Add an App, choose Picture Library, and then put your pictures in there.The default is 15 seconds, and once you pick a library, pick a view in it. Example: You could create a filtered view that only shows pictures from a certain date range or from a certain event. The web part displays them in a rotating slideshow in the exact size of the picture. It helps if you make sure that your pictures are all the same dimensions.

Script Editor – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
For devs or anyone who has jQuery or JavaScript or some type of snippet of code to place on the page. Back in the old days we just used the Content Editor web part for this.

Silverlight Web Part – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Enter the URL of the Silverlight application package (.xap file) to display in the web part. This is usually something that a developer has created custom.

Outlook Web App

If you have Outlook Web Access installed on your in your on premises SharePoint environment OR you have Office 365 including Exchange, you will have these web parts that let you interact with your mailbox.

4/7/2014 update: It looks like these web parts don’t work with Office 365. I put my mail server address as https://outlook.office365/owa, and now the web part says “this content cannot be displayed in a frame”.

My Calendar

My Contacts

My Inbox

My Mail Folder

My Tasks

Search

Enterprise only. If you go to a search site (and the results page) in SharePoint, and “Edit Page” and take a look at all of the web parts that are involved, these are the ones you’ll find there. I like the search results web part a lot, and sometimes I use it instead of the new Content Search web part. It has a lot of similar settings.

Refinement – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365

Search Box – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365

Search Navigation – NEW – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365

Search Results – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365

Taxonomy Refinement Panel – NEW – Publishing features enabled – SharePoint 2013 – These are used with cross-site publishing, and you can find more information about them here.

Search-Driven Content

Enterprise only. These are the same as the Content Search web part listed in the “Content Rollup” category above. These are each pre-configured in order to give you ideas in which the Content Search web part can be used. Note that when you use Content Search, you will have a button called Switch to Advanced Mode (on the Basics tab), which you don’t have in these search-driven content web parts. ALLNEW

Catalog-Item Reuse – To be used with cross-site publishing

Items Matching a Tag – useful in rolling up items that have been tagged with managed metadata terms

Pages – Only shows .aspx pages

Pictures – Only shows pictures. When the end user clicks on one, it takes them to the dispform.aspx page (view properties) for that picture.

Popular Items

Recently Changed Items

Recommended Items

Videos – only shows videos, and shows the length under each one. The best place to keep videos in SP 2013 is an Asset Library (they’re pretty awesome). My test site only has one video, here’s what it looks like in this web part:

Web Pages

Wiki Pages

Social Collaboration

Announcement Tiles – NEW – Office 365 – This looks like a Promoted Links list, but has a couple of slight differences. It has a begin and end date field, and each announcement will drop off once the end date has passed. It lets you fill in descriptions for each announcement, but doesn’t force you to put a link URL in it like a promoted links list does. It only shows one announcement at a time, and there are no web part settings to configure. I saw this web part in one of my Office 365 tenants but not the other, but I’m not sure why.

Contact Details – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365 – lets you pick one person from a people picker, and display the contact info for that person.

Note Board – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365 – This shows the Note Board for a page, but I think the site feed web part is what you’d want to use instead.

Organization Browser – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365 – It’s supposed to show the Org in a Silverlight control that you can interact with, but the only place I’ve seen this actually function is on the My Site. How can you see this? Click Newsfeed and click on someone else’s name besides your own. On the right you’ll see “Org Chart”. Click See More. Click each person’s name to navigate through the org. This is all based off of the “Manager” property in user profiles.

Site Feed – NEW – Enterprise site collection features enabled – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Have a conversation on your team site! Any conversations or comments will show up in your newsfeed as well. Here’s a screenshot from my virtual environment, with some social comments I made up. You can also click the ellipsis on any of these comments, and choose Follow up. This will add a task to your own personal task list on your My Site.

Site Users – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Shows the name of the users in a specific SharePoint group, or all groups on a site. If you have integrated instant messaging (like Lync), you can quickly see people’s presence and IM them.

Tag Cloud – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Shows a tag cloud pertaining to tags that the current user has tagged (by default). Optionally display the number of tags next to each term. You can also change it to show tags from all users or tags under the current URL by all users. Default item max is 50, and you can change this.

User Tasks – SharePoint 2013 / Office 365
Shows the currently logged in user all of the tasks assigned to them in task lists on the current website. The rollup of all tasks on user’s My Sites are much better, though!

SQL Server Reporting

SQL Server Reporting Services Report Viewer
This is only available if SQL Server Reporting Services has been installed on one of your SharePoint servers.

Others

Find by Document ID – only on the Document Center and Records center sites.

** Another cool new thing in SharePoint 2013 that isn’t really an out-of-box web part, is the new list type called Promoted Links. Create your pretty links with images and display this list in a web part on your home page or anywhere!

Thank you for the Wonderful Post Laura,
I need your help in the configuring SP 2013 to display content from OWA\Exchange server 2013.

As you have mentioned in your post :

Outlook Web App

If you have Outlook Web Access installed on your in your on premises SharePoint environment OR you have Office 365 including Exchange, you will have these web parts that let you interact with your mailbox.

Hi Laura and Matt,
I am sorry for missing those comments, was little busy with another deadline.

So long story short, I am working on a Sharepoint page to integrate the OWAContactsWebPart to help us display the contacts for each employee from OWA & exchange server (2013) installed on-premise.

I am facing the same problem as you (Laura) mentioned in her post. However, it displays a link which prompts to open the content in a new window.
The trouble is the URL constructed by the OWA Contacts part is
as per the Exchange Server 2010 (I think)..

Hi Laura,
I attended your no-code solution session at SPC14 and bookmarked your blog when I got back. I appreciate all the great info!
Anyway, my question is:
Is Project Server required to use the project summary web parts? We have Enterprise SP2013 On-Prem and I’ve created a site from the Project Site Template and the Project Summary web part just says that the web part was unable to load, please contact your administrator. Shouldn’t this work out of the box?
Thanks!

I have a question and may be you can answer : In the “Site Contents” view, libraries and others lists are displayed into pretty icon with information like number of items, new status, last modifed time. On your post, an example is your “Indicator Details” picture.

I’m looking for a way to display this kind of view for specific lists or libraries.

“Promoted link” webapp can display customized image for a list but no information about it.

Thank you for filling a much needed niche in understanding SP13 OOB web part functionality. I wish Microsoft would build your explanations and examples into their web part descriptions. It would save a lot of experimentation time.

I have found the web part but it doesn’t seem to work like it use to. You must first create a site collection and choose the Basic Search Center template for SharePoint Foundation 2013 or Enterprise Search Center template for SharePoint Server. See full MS Tech Net article here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh582314(v=office.15).aspx Then you still need to edit the default web part to add the “Advanced Search” option. Once you do this you can click on the “Advanced Search” option and you will have a link you can put on any page within your farm for users to get to the web part. I still don’t see any way to put the web part on other pages like you could in 2007 and 2010. I even tried to export and import the web part to another page but received errors.

Thanks, Laura. I’ve been referring some new Site Owners to this list for an intro to what’s available.
One cool thing I noticed while playing with the Project Summary: it combines both task lists and calendar events in one visual, which is pretty handy.

Hi Laura,
I am working on sharepoint 2010.I am new on this technology.
My requirment is i have two site collections like A and B.
I want to fetch all list data in A site collection as well as B Site Collection.Please assist how i need to proceed.

Dan,
With the regular search web part, it has some settings you can tweak. You can check the box next to “show advanced link” and it’s got an “advanced search page URL” you can set. Oh yeah I see your second comment now. It just works differently. What’s the exact functionality you are missing?

Aditi,
You can use the Content Search web part now in 2013 to display content on another site or site collection. There are a tra-zillion ways to configure this web part.

Hey Joy, thanks, I didn’t notice that!

Rama,
What type of content is it? It helps to be able to point to a specific type of item or content type, and use the content search web part to specify your URLs and type of content to roll into one place.

RE: Site Feed on Team Sites — It seems only folks with contribute permissions can post & reply. I would like all viewers from whole site collection to be able to post on any team site. Do I have to break inheritance on all these “Microfeed” lists in each site’s Site Content to give all viewers contribute permission? Hate to break inheritance if there’s another way.

Sorry if I’m putting a question in the wrong place. Our Admin has given me owner status on a site. I had all the default web parts but now they have disappeared and the only option I get is Apps. The only thing that changed was he activated publishing features for my site. Would you know why I have lost access to the web parts.
Thanks.

Hi Laura
your blog is amazing and i constantly come back to it for new stuff 🙂 i wanted to ask you a question we’re trying to build a blog using sp 2013 and we want to allow some users to post anonymously, could you please help?
Regards,
Mohamed

Jean,
When you create a new team site, by default the newsfeed already has different permissions than the rest of the site, so the newsfeed is already opened up for anyone to be able to comment on it. Maybe someone changed the default permissions on your site? Try creating a new team site and see if you see that behavior.

Suzi, see if the site feature called “Team Collaboration Lists” got removed? Also, see if “SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features” and standard features are still enabled? It’s not normal behavior for all of the web parts to disappear like that. Can you still add lists and libraries as web parts? There’s also a list at the root of your site collection, of all the web parts. Maybe you don’t have access to it anymore? It’s in the “galleries” section in site settings at the root of the site collection, something like site/_catalogs/wp/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Thanks for the response, Laura.
Yes, I have tried that (creating a new/fresh team site) about a dozen new team sites now, and the Microfeed list permissions all say: “This list inherits permissions from its parent.” So, my visitors (with read only privileges) CANNOT post/reply to the newsfeed. But, if I break inheritance on the list, and change the visitors permissions to “contribute”, then anyone can post and reply. The same is true for the Discussion Boards. The DB list(s) inherit site permissions, so my visitors cannot post to the discussion boards unless I break inheritance there also. It’s a bit frustrating and does not seem logical…
@jmatuska

I just finished watching the hour of power that Kevin did on Promoted Links. Do you know of any way without extensive coding to allow other sites to consume/display a single promoted links tile set on multiple pages? The idea is to have a master/reference promoted links list which can be shown on other sites/pages. When the reference set of links gets updated then the updates flow out to all the other places where the promoted links list was added. I understand we can use the content search web part to surface items from any site collection. Unfortunately, my testing does not show that the visual representation is the same with the tiles. Any info you have would be greatly appreciated. I want to use the promoted links like a menu on several sites; however, if I think ahead…I don’t want to go to each set of promoted links if I need to update or delete a URL.

Laura, thank you for this information. I was wondering if you had any input on the “I Need To” web part? I was using it on my SharePoint 2010 sites. I notice it’s not listed above. Also, we recently updated to 2013, but are still on the 2010 UI. The I Need To web part still functions, but when I try to direct the user to an email address as the “link,” it no longer functions (only when they are directed to a web page).

Do you know if the I Need To web part still functions in 2013, or is there a new alternative that Microsoft recommends in its place? Since we are not on the 2013 UI, I haven’t been able to play with all the new features. We will be upgrading the front end in a few months.

I posted a question yesterday, but please disregard. I was able to create a workaround using the HTML form web part in place of the I Need To web part to allow me to direct people to a web page or Email address. Thanks
@txmissyd

I am learning about site feed and news feed web part. Currently I am not able to add site feed web part in SharePoint online. can you
Tell me what can be wrong? I have activated feature site feed. It still doesn’t show.

It was requested that I take a uploaded document in Sharepoint 2013 (MS Project, file) and create a workflow that will read it and write it back to a template or page within the sharepoint. Is that possible?

Hi Maria, I’ve never seen it just not be there. I guess double check that the publishing site collection feature is enabled, and usually you’ll see both the Content Query web part and the Summary Links one at that point. Also, there are several page layouts that have summary link web parts built into them.

I know this post is 4 years old but I am at my wits end and looking for help. I have multiple Report web part page with status lists. for some reason when I add more then one Status indicator webparts the added webparts will not update the status indicators. It will on the original but the added ones will have the green bar status that never updates. I would be thankful with any pointers to get this to work!